This blog explores a family history search. It addresses genealogy, Jewish heritage travel and artwork. It has taken the author to Belarus, the Ukraine and Poland where she visited her ancestral towns as well as Lithuania where she studied Yiddish at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute. As the author is both an artist and a genealogist, the blog also addresses her artwork related to her family and cultural history.

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Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Sleeping With the Chickens and Bricks for Bread

It has been a bit of a whirlwind since returning from Poland. I recently spent a weekend in New York where I met up with my Israeli friend who set much of my Radom project in motion when he sent me the 1937 film of Radom. While there I interviewed two survivors from Radom, one of whom lived next door to my family in Radom. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with the interviews, but given that most survivors are in their late 80s and early 90s, I felt that I should take advantage of the opportunity while I could. Interviewing an elder population does forestall procrastination.

Upon my return I received my work back from Poland, just one day before a huge open studio event in Minneapolis known as Art-a-Whirl. It is always a good opportunity to interact with people around my work so I was pleased to be able to include the Hole in Time Series on Radom that you’ve seen in this blog. Art-a-Whirl which sports a tornado as its symbol ended up with a real tornado and closed with a rainbow visible from our studio window after a weekend of visiting with art patrons.

Since returning from Poland I’ve been winding up my oral history project on Jewish Identity and Legacy. With most of our interviews done and the end date looming, I’ve been drafting a final grant report and teaching myself video-editing. Many of the interviews generated wonderful stories that I hope to include in a DVD.

I have also begun to develop paintings around the stories that have emerged. In fact, source material was my original impetus for the project although it has proven to be quite fascinating in its own right.

One of our interviews was with a woman who grew up in north Minneapolis, originally the home to much of the Jewish community. She related the following story to us about staying with her grandmother when she was young.

I remember my grandmother had a one bedroom apartment. She had a mattress must have been about that thick (holds hands two to three feet apart), all feathers you know, and a stool to get up. So when it was time to go to bed, I crawled in to get into bed to sleep with her… next to the bed my grandmother had two live chickens in a box and I was deathly afraid of chickens and that’s where I had to sleep that night with the live chickens there.

In the morning she’d go to the shocket (a kosher butcher) and have the chickens killed. She’d carry them to the shocket and come back and flick them. Sit in the back yard and flick ‘em. Every time on a weekend. She’d go like on a Friday morning before Shabbos started and get her chickens and when I’d come to sleep with her she’d have the chickens Friday. And every time I went I had to go sleep there and I had to sleep with those chickens. I’ll never forget that. I was scared to death that night.

That image stayed with me and led to the painting called Sleeping With the Chickens.

Another story that I’ve sought to capture was provided by a subject who was a Holocaust survivor. He told us of being sent from Auschwitz to Warsaw to help dismantle the Warsaw ghetto. After the ghetto was destroyed, buildings were dismantled and bricks sold to the Poles. He told me that he would go down in the basements for bricks and discover bodies that he covered with sand.

Then they (the Nazis) need a transport to go to Warsaw. But they didn’t take any people who speak Polish, but they didn’t know … I could speak Polish. So I got in between the French and the Italians and the Greeks and I got into Warsaw… The Warsaw ghetto was bombed. People were laying on the basements there like flies. So what they did is to blow up the rest of it, the rest of the building and they covered up the other ones. Then I had to do clean up with the bricks...The Polish people came in with a horse and a wagon and they were buying those bricks from the Germans. When they got in they had to pay so much and they had to show me a piece of paper, how many bricks they need to buy. So I gave them the bricks they needed to buy and sometimes I ask them if they have bread or something like that. Pretty soon they got smart, they brought me a bread, they brought me a salami and I gave them those bricks. I gave them instead of 20 bricks, I gave them 25 bricks. See the five bricks they had a hole on the wagon and they put it in the holder so the Germans, because they count the bricks when they went out. They gave them 20 bricks and going out they had to show the paper that they got 20 bricks, so they went up on the wagon and count the bricks, but they didn’t count the other ones.

The painting, Bricks for Bread, shows the Warsaw ghetto in its destruction in the distance. One church remained amongst the rubble. This gentleman survived frequently by his wits and used his skills in bartering later in rebuilding his life and a business.

These early paintings are experiments in capturing the imagery based solely on the words. Usually I have some visual imagery to work with, but in this case I need to create my own. When I travel I frequently take photos for reference so my photos of horse-drawn carts in the Ukraine came in handy.

This project has been made possible in
part through the Arts and Cultural Heritage
Fund through the vote of Minnesotans on
November 4, 2008. Administered by the
Minnesota Historical Society.

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Welcome

Welcome to this blog. In these pages I address the issues that are of deep interest to me. I take you on my travels to Eastern Europe, my observations about the former and present Jewish communities in those countries and the response of those countries to their history. I capture this in both words and artwork and frequently share my artwork in these pages. In addition I address my genealogy research based on family who originated in many of the places I explore. This has been a process of discovery for me and I invite you to join me on this journey.

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About Me

Susan Weinberg both researches and paints family, cultural and community history. Her family history interests and travel frequently inform her artwork.
Susan traveled to Vilnius, Lithuania where she studied Yiddish at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute and developed a series of artwork on how Lithuania deals with its Holocaust history. She has traveled to her ancestral towns where she did research in the archives. Susan has created Kehila links (websites on ancestral towns) for Dunilovichi, Belarus and Radom, Poland. Out of this research she developed a series of artwork on the pre-war Jewish community from which her family came.
Susan has exhibited her artwork nationally and internationally. Her current body of work is the Jewish Identity and Legacy project, a project which includes oral history and art creation. Based in Minneapolis-St Paul, Susan creates artwork and does genealogy consulting. She speaks frequently on her artwork and genealogy topics. She maintains two blogs, Layers of the Onion with a family history and art focus and Creative Connections.on the Minneapolis Jewish Artists' Lab.